Origin of CURRY

Most people in the world today know what a curry is - or at least think they do. In Britain the term ‘curry’ has come to mean almost any Indian dish, whilst most people from the sub-continent would say it is not a word they use, but if they did it would mean a meat, vegetable or fish dish with spicy sauce and rice or bread.

The earliest known recipe for meat in spicy sauce with bread appeared on tablets found near Babylon in Mesopotamia, written in cuniform text as discovered by the Sumerians, and dated around 1700 B.C., probably as an offering to the god Marduk.

The origin of the word itself is the stuff of legends, but most pundits have settled on the origins being the Tamil word ‘kari’ meaning spiced sauce. In his excellent Oxford Companion to Food, Alan Davidson quotes this as a fact and supports it with reference to the accounts from a Dutch traveller in 1598 referring to a dish called ‘Carriel’. He also refers to a Portuguese cookery book from the seventeenth century calledAtre do Cozinha, with chilli-based curry powder called ‘caril’.

In her ‘50 Great Curries of India’, Camellia Panjabi says the word today simply means ‘gravy’. She also goes for the Tamil word ‘kaari or kaaree’ as the origin, but with some reservations, noting that in the north, where the English first landed in 1608 then 1612, a gravy dish is called ‘khadi’.

Pat Chapman of Curry Club fame offers several possibilities:- ‘karahi or karai(Hindi)’ from the wok-shaped cooking dish, ‘kari’ from the Tamil or ‘Turkuri’ a seasonal sauce or stew.

The one thing all the experts seem to agree on is that the word originates from India and was adapted and adopted by the British Raj.

On closer inspection, however, there is just as much evidence to suggest the word was English all along.

In the time of Richard I there was a revolution in English cooking . In the better-off kitchens, cooks were regularly using ginger, cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, galingale, cubebs, coriander, cumin, cardamom and aniseed, resulting in highly spiced cooking very similar to India. They also had a ‘powder fort’, ‘powder douce’ and ‘powder blanch’.

Then, in Richard II’s reign (1377-1399) the first real English cookery book was written. Richard employed 200 cooks and they, plus others including philosophers, produced a work with 196 recipes in 1390 called ‘The Forme of Cury’. ‘Cury’ was the Old English word for cooking derived from the French ‘cuire’ - to cook, boil, grill - hence cuisine.